Portable medical devices are useful for patients that have conditions that must be monitored on a continuous or frequent basis. For example, diabetics are usually required to modify and monitor their daily lifestyle to keep their blood glucose (BG) in balance. Individuals with Type 1 diabetes and some individuals with Type 2 diabetes use insulin to control their BG levels. To do so, diabetics are advised to routinely keep strict schedules, including ingesting timely nutritious meals, partaking in exercise, monitoring BG levels daily, and adjusting and administering insulin dosages accordingly.
The prior art includes a number of fluid infusion devices and insulin pump systems that are designed to deliver accurate and measured doses of insulin via infusion sets (an infusion set delivers the insulin through a small diameter tube that terminates at, e.g., a cannula inserted under the patient's skin). In lieu of a syringe, the patient can simply activate the insulin pump to administer an insulin bolus as needed, for example, in response to the patient's high BG level. A patient can monitor BG levels using a BG meter or measurement device and by using a continuous glucose sensor if so desired.
In practice, many processes and behaviors result in fluctuations in BG levels. Commonly recognized processes and factors impacting BG levels include food, exercise, disease (acute or chronic), medication (insulin, oral, etc.), and stress and sleep patterns, among others. Furthermore, behavioral and environmental factors such as the time of the day, attentiveness to therapy, and insulin pump maintenance, can provide additional quantitative indications of the underlying factors impacting glucose control. Current reporting tools available to diabetes patients and their caregivers do not provide correlative analyses that can pinpoint specific and personalized behaviors that are associated with a patient's particular glycemic outcomes. Moreover, current reporting mechanisms do not deliver the relevant analyses intelligently at a time most suitable for the users' maximal awareness.
Accordingly, it is desirable to have a system and related methodologies that support enhanced and more intelligent reporting to diabetes patients using an insulin infusion system. In addition, it is desirable to have a mobile application platform that facilitates the delivery of intelligent messages and notifications to diabetes patients. Furthermore, other desirable features and characteristics will become apparent from the subsequent detailed description and the appended claims, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings and the foregoing technical field and background.